In February of 1848, Indian Agent Robert S. Neighbors (murdered by Erath vigilantes in 1859) stayed a few days in Old Owl’s camp on the headwaters of the Leon River. While there he learned of the Comanche custom in which the first man to wake in the morning woke the others with a song.

Kenneth F. Neighbours, Robert Simpson Neighbors and the Texas Frontier: 1836-1859, Waco: Texian Press, 1975.

For decades cotton was the scourge of this area, requiring plenty of cheap labor in exchange for deep poverty. I don’t have information about the number of sharecroppers in this area, but I know that the degrading, feudalistic system was common wherever cotton was king. The cattle industry and later railroad work provided an escape from servitude. In 1881, railroad construction near Proctor drew away so many sharecroppers that the Comanche Chief ran an article that noted, “never before known here, and at least three hundred acres on different farms will consequently go uncultivated this year. We want emigrants – men to till our rich soil.”

During the night of February 9, 1899, someone slipped into W.E. Gregg’s lot and painted his beautiful buggy horse a deep Diamond dye green. “Such works as this is a dastardly outrage and the miscreants should hunted down and punished to the full extent of the law.” Erath Appeal

In February, 1897, a fire in one of Thurber’s coal mines suffocated eleven mules.

Mary Jane Gentry, The Life and Death of a Texas Town, Master’s thesis, University of Texas, 1946.

In 1871 Henry Strong “went to Stephenville for a load of flour . . . near the head of Blanket Creek, the Indians ran on to me. I stopped the mules and tied my lines around a small live oak tree. The Indians kept up a continual fire with bows, arrows, pistols, and old guns . . . I finally cut one mule loose and jumped on him and started for a small bunch of brush on Blanket Creek.” Having only one shot left, Strong waited until the Indians left, refusing to fire, although the Indians taunted him by holding out their hands as if to shake, saying “me good Comanche.”

Henry W. Strong, My Frontier Days and Indian Fights on the Plains of Texas. Waco: 1926.

The Franco-Texienne Bill, favored by Sam Houston in the 1840s, would have allowed French colonists to build a fort at the site of later Stephenville – giving the settlers three million acres in the area. Later, a 60,000 acre tract known as the Kimball’s Block was almost sold to a group of New England farmers who would have arrived as a group to Erath County – which would have imprinted the area with quite a different character. In 1853, Because he was killed in the Alamo, the heirs of John Blair were given 17 labors of land. Thomas Blair, with the power of attorney for the family, sold the land because nobody in the family would move to Texas from Missouri. John M. Stephen bought some of the land, now in Erath County, 1, 920 acres for $500. The following year he followed the Bosque up from Waco to see the land.

Dan Young, History Calendar, 1986

Spanish ranchers in early Texas allowed their bulls to fight each other for control of the herds to keep them tough and difficult for Comanches to rustle. Before mixing with European breeds produced the longhorns, these feral cattle escaped from missions and ranged along the Central Texas rivers for over a hundred yers. They were of Moorish stock, black, and with “with horns set forward to kill, like the buffalo.” These cattle were described as “quick, restless, constantly on the lookout for danger, snuffing the air, and moving with a light elastic step. In their sense of smell thy were fully the equal of deer. A wounded bull has been known to hunt for his enemy by scent, trailing him on the ground like a bear.” Unlike buffalo, these cattle browsed back the shrubs along the Bosque, encouraging the growth of thorny red and black haws, which came to dominate the river’s vegetation until the late 19th Century. The first Erath settlers were able to fill their baskets with haws until the thorny bushes were crowded out by the increasing non-thorny vegetation. Allan Nelson, Tarleton biologist, has declared the haws extinct in Erath County. There is specimen of black haw on the Stephenville Museum grounds in front of the Carriage house.

J. Frank Dobie, The Longhorns, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982; May Theilgaard Watts, Reading the Landscape: An Adventure in Ecology, New York: Macmillan Co., 1963; and Interviews with Stephenville retirement home residents in the 1980s.

In 1857 an Anadarko man, Red Jack, came to Stephenville to buy a bottle of whiskey and became very drunk. It was an odd thing because the Anadarko were known to avoid alcohol. His unusual behavior led to his death and he was buried just west of the current bridge over highway 377, probably along the now Bosque Trail. An article in the February, 1922 Stephenville Tribune by Mack Wilson recalled that around 1900, boys dug up the grave and removed an arm bone which they made into a quirt handle. Mrs. Morque Parnell, an early settler, objected so strongly that the bones were destroyed.

Stephenville Empire, 1884: Women complained that men “old enough and ugly enough to know better” stand on the boardwalks in front of the stores around the Square like “wooden Indians . . . forcing the women to walk around them in the muddy streets.”

1873: “Those persons engaged in agriculture who have but recently arrived in our state may not be aware of the absolute necessity of early planting.” Fort Worth Democrat

Joe Fitzgerald founded the first nursery in Erath County in 1900. He is best remembered for developing the Early Wonder blackberry from local plants, and for the Eureka Persimmon. Fitzgerald said that February is the great tree planting month, “it is always better to cut them back about half or to 18 inches.” Fitzgerald’s first large order was for sycamore trees that lined Washington Street until most of them died out by the 1960s. Here and there in Stephenville one of these now very large trees survives. There is one that I can see from my window where Everitt and Vanderbilt meet.

Joe Fitzgerald, Family Papers, Stephenville, Texas

During the 1890s, at Johnson School House, a hand-dug well was in the process of being completed and it was left uncovered. A preaching in a nearby brush arbor resulted in 13 dogs falling into the well. One gets the idea, after reading the 1936 Stephenville Empire-Tribune article, that dogs took advantage of the gathering to meet and greet. After the dogs were pulled out, a new well had to be dug because of the unlucky number.